In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of applications using voice communications. For instance, the Internet has allowed individuals to make telephone calls through a computer, or to talk to other people participating in an online multiplayer game. As such communications systems have evolved, it has become increasingly common for such individuals to not only desire audio communications, but also video connection to the other participants.
In some circumstances microphones can be built into a computer or monitor, or may be an external device which is attached to a computer or monitor. Due to the distance between such microphones and the user, such microphones must be able to receive input from a greater area. As a consequence, such microphones are also subject to picking up increased background noise.
Accordingly, there is a need for a high fidelity far field noise canceling microphone that possesses good background noise cancellation and that can be used in any type of noisy environment, as described in parent U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,767,973 and 8,150,054. Such sensor array systems are advantageous especially in environments where a lot of music and speech is present as background noise (as in a game arena or internet café), and a microphone that does not need the user to have to deal with positioning the microphone from time to time. In addition to the an integrated array of microphones utilizing an adaptive beam forming algorithm, the adaptive beam forming algorithm may be responsive to other input for beam forming available in the communication systems being used by the participants to provide enhanced beam forming. Such an invention allows a large degree of freedom because it considers inputs other than the audio received by the microphone sensor array and may therefore compensate for noise that may be captured by the beam forming algorithm having audio only input. Further, such a configuration allows a user to electronically steer the microphone's beam, or the area in which it accepts voice input, as opposed to having to physically steer the microphone array.